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Hamilton met his first major engineering obstacle 32km north of Shaqlawa: a 198m-high ridge rising from the desert plains to the village of Spilk, which he described as “a lonely spot with an unsavoury reputation for robbery and murder”. To build a road up through the “great boulders higher than a standing man”, he assembled an eclectic army of Kurdish, Arabic and Persian workers for the hard labour, while the project overseer was an Assyrian Christian, the surveyor a Bengali Hindu and the explosives expert an Armenian Jew. With so many religious beliefs to accommodate, Hamilton proposed that as a compromise, nobody should have a holy day of rest, and so they toiled seven days a week, enduring temperatures of 40C, poisonous snakes and outbreaks of malaria.
“There were tribal blood feuds going on all around them, too,” said Hussein, as we drove up the looping hairpin bends that they went on to construct. “The workers would show Hamilton the skulls and dead bodies that they found amongst the rocks. It was an extraordinary achievement to get them to complete their mission at all.”
We crested the ridge at Spilk, where the road narrowed from four lanes to two. Hamilton described the path ahead as a “50-mile maze of gorges and canyons”, but he relished the scale of this particular challenge, setting up camp near the waterfalls of Gali Ali Bag where he would remain for two years. Following ibex and goat tracks, he began mapping out the shortest possible route through the canyonlands and ordered specialist equipment from England, including jackhammers, air-compressors, steam rollers and steel bridge parts that were shipped by boat, train and truck thousands of miles to Shaqlawa, before a caravan of camels carried them up to his mountain base.
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